I successfully installed a wave (google) server on a windows box a few days earlier. It was a great feeling. Here are the components that made up the server
- Postgres database to be used by XFire.
- Wave related server jar which runs the server
- Wave command line client that runs the simplistic console client.
I started the console client and typed in a few commands to go through the waves. New, open, view waves were some commands that the command line console allowed you to execute. This client was a simple RI provided by google. If you would like to install a server on your own, take a look at the installation instructions.
Wave console client:
Things got even better today when we got our second google wave account for the same user. mmm 
wait… a second google wave account ? Yep. Google wave is split into googlewave.com accounts for normal end users and the wavesandbox.com accounts for developers and geeks. It is interesting to note the differences.
Googlewave:
- Is a little less buggier. It has more features like read only waves that the sandbox is missing.
- Linked to your existing gmail and docs. All your existing contacts can be… contacted.
- Has this cool green box that opens up for active wave conversations.
- No debugging or anything technically related.
- Number of invites allowed are varied. If you requested for the account yourself, you get anywhere from 8 – 22 invites (from what I have heard so far).
Wave sandbox
- Pretty buggy and is a developer’s paradise.
As most of you are aware by now, developers can write java robots that can aid a conversation that happens in google wave. A conversation is a wavelet and each reply in this wavelet is called a blip. There are some ‘getting started’ tutorials available out there that are of great help. These links should help you
Official google wave guide
Google wave getting started – Sort of an abridged version of the official guide written by Vogella.
Grasping the overall picture of a java robot is a little difficult. This is because there are no flow or architecture diagrams (at least none that I know of) that show you the sequence of events. Given below is a diagram that does that. Assume that you wrote a java robot that is meant to edit blips in a wavelet. The robot should provide a profanity filter service which will delete objectionable words from the wave. This is how the series of events happen.
After a long wait I got a google wave account. yay ! Took the wave for a spin over the last few days and there were some interesting things that I observed. I wrote my first java wave robot and it was pretty cool. But an explanation of how the robot works should be left to another post all together. I will share my general observations in this post.
Deleted welcome messages:
The first thing that was weird was that welcome messages are often deleted by wave users or by bots. This is nuts. The wave welcome messages also have a lot of noise amidst them with quotes like ‘Please do not delete this !’ in bold red with a big font size. Wave still does not have a feature to disable edits. It is coming soon but it is not yet active.
Lonely waves:
Blogger, which google acquired a while back is now ten years old. Google is celebrating the 10th anniversary by distributing presents. Its been quite a journey for blogger since its acquisition and the last ten years have seen tons and tons of blogs being added to blogger.
So as I surfed the web today, like any other good internet citizen I faithfully typed google.com into the browser address bar. Here is what I saw
Google promotes reader:
